Local LLMs: Owning Your AI Stack

The most interesting thing happening in AI right now is not a bigger model in some data center. It is how much you can already run on hardware you own. With tools like llama.cpp and Ollama, capable open-weight models run locally and offline, and your data never leaves the machine.

What makes this possible is quantization. Store the weights in 4 or 5 bits instead of 16 and a model that used to need a server GPU suddenly fits in ordinary RAM, with surprisingly little loss in quality. A normal laptop can hold an assistant that is actually useful.

Why bother when a cloud API is one call away? Privacy is the obvious reason; sensitive code and documents stay at home. But there is also cost, latency, and the simple fact that a local tool keeps working when your connection does not.

AI is following the same path Linux did, from something only large players could run to something anyone can host themselves. For a homelab, a local model is simply the next service to add to the rack.

KiCad: Professional PCB Design, Fully Open Source

For a long time, serious PCB design meant paying for an expensive commercial license. That is no longer the case. KiCad has reached the point where professional engineers pick it on merit, not because it is free but because it is good. The workflow is what you would hope for:

The Birthday Paradox: Why 23 People Is All It Takes

Here is a question that trips up most people. In a room of just 23 people, what is the chance that two of them share a birthday? Most guess something tiny. The actual answer is over 50%. The trick is to turn the question around. Instead of counting matches, count

Lazarus: Native Cross-Platform Apps Without the Bloat

Plenty of modern desktop apps ship an entire browser engine just to draw a window. Lazarus goes the other way. It is a free, open-source RAD IDE built on the Free Pascal compiler, and it produces real native binaries that are small, fast, and do not drag a runtime along

Yocto: Building Your Own Linux, One Layer at a Time

Put Linux on a custom board and you hit a wall fairly quickly: no off-the-shelf distribution fits. It is too big, ships the wrong libraries, or has no support for your exact SoC. The Yocto Project takes a different route. Instead of trimming down somebody else's distro, you

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KiCad: Professional PCB Design, Fully Open Source

The Birthday Paradox: Why 23 People Is All It Takes

Lazarus: Native Cross-Platform Apps Without the Bloat

Yocto: Building Your Own Linux, One Layer at a Time